“I text-messaged you,” Anne tells me, and she’s shrouded in blue as she works on a computer that is contained in a waterproof stainless-steel enclosure, the sealed keyboard mounted at a height suitable for typing while standing. Behind her on the autopsy table of station one, which is now shiny and clean, is the man from Norton’s Woods.
“I’m sorry,” I say to her abstractedly as I think of Liam Saltz and worry what his connection might be to this dead man, beyond robots, particularly MORT. “My phone’s in my office, and I’ve not been in there,” I say to Anne, and then I ask Benton, “Does he have other children?”
“He’s at the Charles Hotel,” Benton replies. “Someone’s on the way to talk to him. But to answer your question, yes, he does. He has a number of children and stepchildren from multiple marriages.”
“I wanted to let you know I didn’t feel comfortable uploading his scans and e-mailing them,” Anne then says to me. “Don’t know what we’re dealing with and thought it was better to play it extra-safe. If you’re going to hang around, you need to cover up.” She directs this to Benton. “Got no clue what this one’s been exposed to, but he didn’t set off any alarms. At least he’s not radio active. Whatever he’s got in him isn’t, thank God.”
“I assume all was quiet at the hospital. No incidents,” Benton says to her. “I’m not staying.”
“Security escorted us in and out, and we didn’t see anyone else—no patients or staff, at any rate.”
“You found something in him?” I ask her.
“Trace amounts of metal.” Anne’s gloved hands move on the computer’s keyboard and click the mouse, both freshly overlaid with industrial silicone. Fielding’s sloppy presence is noticeably gone from the autopsy room, and I see water in the sink of station one—my station—and a big sponge, the surgical instruments bright and shiny and neatly arranged on the dissecting board. I spot a mop that wasn’t here earlier, and a whetstone on a counter-top.
“I’m amazed,” I say to her as I look around.
“Ollie,” she says, clicking the mouse. “I called him, and he drove back and spruced up the place.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It’s not that we haven’t tried while you were gone. Jack’s been using this work space, and we’ve learned to stay away.”
“How can there be metal that didn’t show up on CT?” Benton watches her scroll through files she created at the neuroimaging lab, looking for the images she wants from the MRI.
“If it’s really small,” I explain to him how it’s possible. “A threshold size of less than point-five millimeters and I wouldn’t expect it to be detected on CT. That’s why we wanted to rule out the possibility by using MR, and apparently it’s a good thing.”
“Although maybe not if he was alive,” Anne says, clicking on a file. “You don’t want something ferromagnetic in a living person, because it’s going to torque. It’s going to move. Like metal shavings in the eyes of people involved in professions that expose them to something like that. They may not even know it until they get an MRI. Then they know it; boy, do they ever. Or if they have body piercings they don’t tell us about, and we’ve seen that enough times,” she says to Benton. “Or, God forbid, a pacemaker. Metal moves, and it heats up.”
“Theories?” I ask her, because I can’t imagine an event or a weapon that could create what has just filled the video display.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she answers as we study high-resolution images of the dead man’s internal damage, a dark distorted area of signal voids that starts just inside the buttonhole wound and becomes increasingly less pronounced the deeper the penetration inside the organs and soft tissue structures of the chest.
“Because of the magnetic field, even with what must be particles incredibly minute, you’re going to get artifact. Right here,” I point out to Benton. “These very dark and distorted areas where there’s no signal penetration. You get this blooming artifact along the wound track, what’s left of the wound track, because the signal’s been blown out by metal. He’s got some sort of ferromagnetic foreign bodies inside him, all right.”
“What could do that?” Benton asks.
“I’m going to have to recover some of it, analyze it.” I think of what Lucy said about thermite. It would be ferromagnetic just as bullets are, both metal composites having iron oxide in common.
“Point-five? The size of dust?” Benton’s eyes are distracted by other thoughts.
“A little bigger,” Anne replies.
“About the size of gunshot residue, grains of unburned powder,” I add.
“A projectile like a bullet could be reduced to frag no bigger than grains of gunshot powder,” Benton considers, and I can tell he is connecting what I’m saying with something else, and I think of my niece and wonder exactly what she said to him while they were together in her lab this morning. I think of shark bang sticks and nanoexplosives, but there are no thermal injuries, no burns. It wouldn’t make sense.
“No projectile I’ve ever seen,” Anne says, and I agree. “Do we know anything more about who he might be?” She means the body on the table. “I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop.”
“Hopefully soon,” Benton replies.
“It sounds like you might have an idea,” Anne says to him.
“Our first clue was he showed up at Norton’s Woods at the same time Dr. Saltz was inside the building, and that was something to check because of certain interests these two individuals would have in common.” He means robots, I suspect.
“I don’t think I know who that is,” Anne says to him.
“A scientist who won a Nobel Prize and is an expatriate,” Benton says, and as I observe him with Anne I’m reminded they are colleagues and friends, that he treats her with an easy familiarity, with trust that he doesn’t exhibit around most people. “And if he”—Benton indicates the dead man—”knew Dr. Saltz was coming to Cambridge, the question was how.”
“Do we know if he knew that?” I ask.
“Right now we don’t for a fact.”
“So Dr. Saltz was at the wedding. But this one wasn’t dressed for a wedding.” Anne indicates the nude dead body on the table. “He had his dog with him. And a gun.”
“What I know so far is the bride is a daughter from a different marriage,” Benton says as if this detail has been carefully checked. “The daughter’s father, who was supposed to give her away, got sick. So she asked her stepfather, Dr. Saltz, at the last minute, and he couldn’t physically be in two places at once. He flew into Boston on Saturday and made his appearance at Whitehall via satellite. A sacrifice on his part. The last thing he felt like doing, I’m sure, was to reenter the US and show up at Cambridge.”
“The undercover agents?” I ask. “For him? If so, why? I know he has enemies, but why would the FBI be offering protection to a civilian scientist from the UK?”
“That’s the irony,” Benton says. “The security at the event wasn’t about him, was about those attending the wedding, most of them from the UK because of the groom’s family. The groom is Russell Brown’s son, David. Both Liam Saltz’s stepdaughter Ruth and David attend Harvard Law, which is one reason the wedding was here.”
Russell Brown. The shadow secretary of state for defense, whose speech I just read on the RUSI website.
“He shows up at an event like that and is armed,” I say as I move closer to the steel table. “A gun with the serial number eradicated?”